The Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) is to invest around £1.1m in a number of satellite clubs as part of its strategy to improve British tennis.

LTA has created a network of 160 clubs which have been given satellite status. Each club has been tasked with the aim of feeding the UK’s 19 high performance centres with talented youngsters.

Each club had to meet set criteria with one of the major focuses being on regular competition for young players.

As part of the emphasis on future, LTA is also currently in the process of developing a national competition framework for under 10-years-old that will be rolled out across the selected clubs.

LTA chief executive, Roger Draper, said: “Getting more young players competing on a regular basis will lead to more winning players of the future.

“There are currently just fewer than 10,000 regularly competing juniors in this country, compared with some 80,000 in France so it is no surprise that they have many more players in the top 100 than we do.”